Photographers From The United States

"The worst thing is to feel that as a photographer I'm benefiting from someone else's tragedy. This idea haunts me. It's something I have to reckon with every day, because I know that if I ever allow genuine compassion to be overtaken by personal ambition, I will have sold my soul. The only way I can justify my role is to have respect for the other person's predicament. The extent to which I do that is the extent to which I become accepted by the other and to that extent I can accept myself."

"In a war the normal codes of civilized behavior are suspended. It would be unthinkable in so-called normal life to go into someone's home where a family is grieving over the death of a loved one and spend long moments photographing them. It simply wouldn't be done. Those picture could not have been made unless I was accepted by the people I'm photographing. It's simply impossible to photograph moments such as those…without the complicity of the people I'm photographing…without the fact that the welcomed me, that they accepted me, that they wanted me to be there. They understand that a stranger who's come there with a camera to show the rest of the world what is happening to them…gives them a voice in the outside world that they otherwise wouldn't have. I try my best to approach people with respect. I want them to see that I have respect for them and the situation they're in. I want to be very open in my approach…feel open in my own heart towards them. I want them to be aware of that. People do sense it…with very few words…sometimes with no words at all."

"It is the way to educate your eyes, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop."

"Yes, the hidden camera portraits of Walker Evans from 1938 to 1941 represented humanity, but a particular strain of humanity—a chastened one."

"When I first looked at Walker Evans's photographs, I thought of something Malraux wrote: "To transform destiny into awareness." One is embarrassed to want so much for oneself. But, how else are you going to justify your failure and your effort?"

"I'm often asked by students how a photographer gets over the fear and uneasiness in many people about facing a camera, and I just say that any sensitive man is bothered by a thing like that unless the motive is so strong and the belief in what he’s doing is so strong that it doesn’t matter. The important thing is to do the picture. And I advise people who are bothered by this to cure it by saying to themselves, what I’m doing is harmless to these people really, and there’s no malevolence in it and there’s no deception in it, and it is done in a great tradition, examples of which are Daumier and Goya. Daumier’s Third Class Carriage is a kind of snapshot of some actual people sitting in a railway carriage in France in eighteen-something."

"The star system has us making pictures with personalities rather than stories, sacrificing everything in order to keep some old bags playing young women."

"Of all the people who make up a movie production unit, the cameraman is the only one who can call himself a free soul."

"I don't want to know about my biggest idols. I don't want to read their autobiographies, I don't want to find out what they're really like."

"The White Stripes weren't all about Jack White's howling, ripping guitars, even if that's where the conversation tends to go in certain circles. The fact is, Meg White's minimalistic style was the perfect counter to Jack's shredding, a primal dynamic that gave their tunes that definitive garage stomp. Jack provided the flash, Meg provided the feel."

"A really unique feel and super heavy because of the space between the hits. Very influential on me as a teenager. I often think of her when doing certain kick and cymbal hits together. —"

"We've never had problems. We love each other, understand each other, and get past anything."

"I wasn't brought up with any religion, actually."

"We were like a moth right next to the flame. It's like, do any more and you go down. We were so tired. One final lap, and then have a rest."

"It's in this book I was reading. Apparently, there's a little red demon dwarf that haunts the city, and before every major bad thing that's happened, it's appeared to somebody. Last time, he appeared in a Cadillac."

"Actually I don't. I've never played with a bass player before, so I wouldn't even know. It wouldn't feel like it's missing, I just think it's normal … I prefer it that way so I only have to concentrate on Jack."

"I was able to afford a car that didn't break down every five minutes."

"We never really cared about all the things that other people cared about, you know? Like, people recognizing me on the street never interested me. I've always been kind of suspicious of the world, anyway, so it's pretty easy for me to live in my own little world."

"Those images have proved to be an extraordinary record, made with forebodings of misfortune, that bring alive the flavor of the shtetl, of a Jewish peasant tending geese in the Carpathian Mountains, of tumbledown shacks in the Jewish quarter of Lublin, Poland, of Jewish patriarchs, in long caftans and wearing the furry hat called a shtreimel, trudging through the snow. -- Shepard, Richard"

"In addition to his charisma and obvious talents, he was also known to possess what Howard Greenberg, Vishniac’s longtime gallerist, identified as “one of the bigger egos on the planet.”"

"“No one who hasn’t tried it can comprehend the careful planning, the diabolical perseverance and the incredible skill it takes to obtain the [photomicroscopic] results he gets,” the magazine quoted Philippe Halsman, former president of the American Society of Magazine Photographers, as saying of Vishniac. “The man is a special kind of genius.”"

"[Roman Vishniac is] the official mortuary photographer of Eastern European Jewry. -- Leon Wieseltier, editor of The New Republic"

"[His photography was a] guiding force for visual interpretation [of Schindler's List]."

"I met him in 1966, and discovered how undiscovered he was. -- Cornell Capa"

"[his scientific accomplishments] were overshadowed by the photographs he took of Jews in prewar Eastern Europe and in Nazi Berlin. -- Shepard, Richard"

"Vishniac came back from his trips... with a collection of photographs that has become an important historical document, for it gives us a last minute look at the human beings he photographed just before the fury of the Nazi brutality exterminated them. Vishniac took with him on this self-imposed assignment... a rare depth of understanding and a native son's warmth and love for his people. ~ Edward Steichen, ex-director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, in the 1950s."

"These are the faces of children I embraced and kissed and loved. I cannot imagine that they are dead, that none would survive... A million and a half children among the six million... But this I knew... I wanted to save their faces, not their ashes."

"My friends assured me that Hitler’s talk was sheer bombast,” Vishniac said in 1955. “But I replied that he would not hesitate to exterminate those people when he got around to it. And who was there to defend them? I knew I could be of little help, but I decided that, as a Jew, it was my duty to my ancestors, who grew up among the very people who were being threatened, to preserve — in pictures, at least — a world that might soon cease to exist."

"[The Jews who roamed through Moscow looking for work] had a special kind of face ... a special kind of whisper and a special kind of footstep ... They were like hunted animals."

"You can't teach biology with a bottle containing dead animals and organisms."

"The purpose of photography is the transmission of a visualized sector of life through the medium of the camera into a mental process that starts with the photographer's thinking about the subject he photographs and is continued in the mind of the spectator."

"Nature, God, or whatever you want to call the creator of the universe comes through the microscope clearly and strongly"

"...can you call a farm with a dozen geese a farm? Still, it was a little better for the Jews in Czechoslovakia. There were only two pogroms there. What's two pogroms?"

"The Jews of the shtetls that Tolstoy remembered were saints... the people I photographed were saints. So now, in 1983, I tell the world: When you learn about Goethe, don't forget to study the Holocaust, too."

"Concentration camp money... It was a German sadism that invented it. Can you do anything with it? Yes, you can cry."

"Even before the concentration camps, I felt it was my duty to my ancestors to preserve a world which might cease to exist."

"I read the first edition of 'Mein Kampf' when it came out in 1923 and even then I knew Hitler meant what he said. I knew the history of anti-Semitism going back for centuries, and I knew all about pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe. When I grew up and whent to school in Moscow, I experienced anti-Semitism and the restrictions on where Jews could live and work. Hitler systemized anti-Semitism. Pogroms are my business... Oh yes, I could be a professor of anti-Semitism."

"If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough."

"I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term — meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching — there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster."

"The herculean task of a photographer is to capture a momentary frame as beautiful in reality, as it would be in a dream."

"A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense, and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety."

"When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence."

"There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs."

"While the photos at the D.M.V. (New York) will still be taken in color, the engraving is done in grayscale, hence the Ansel Adams feel."

"His attacks on Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, have received so much attention that Watt was asked about the 'thunderous denunciations of his policies by Ansel Adams.' Watt replied with a shrug, 'Ansel Adams never took a picture with a human being in it in his life.' Adams’ friend photographer James Alinder responded, 'James Watt is no better historian of photography than Secretary of the Interior. Ansel Adams has not only made pictures of people, but his portraits form a major part of his photographic production.' In fact, the Carter Administration broke with tradition by having the Presidential portrait done not by a painter but by a photographer—Adams. Although the break with tradition was highly criticized, the Polaroid photo now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington."

"At one with the power of the American landscape, and renowned for the patient skill and timeless beauty of his work, photographer Ansel Adams has been visionary in his efforts to preserve this country's wild and scenic areas, both in film and on Earth. Drawn to the beauty of nature's monuments, he is regarded by environmentalists as a monument himself, and by photographers as a national institution. It is through his foresight and fortitude that so much of America has been saved for future Americans."

"The only things in my life that compatibly exist with this grand universe are the creative works of the human spirit."

"No matter how sophisticated you may be, a large granite mountain cannot be denied — it speaks in silence to the very core of your being."

"Yes, in the sense that the negative is like the composer’s score. Then, using that musical analogy, the print is the performance. (Paraphrased as "Film is the score and the print is the performance.")"

"I would never apologize for photographing rocks. Rocks can be very beautiful. But, yes, people have asked why I don’t put people into my pictures of the natural scene. I respond, “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” That usually doesn’t go over at all."